No crystal ball, but insights on how rural water systems change

It’s hard to predict what impact investments and innovations in the water sector will have on citizens’ access to services. Understanding underlying mechanisms and potential bottlenecks of change can help decide how and where to invest resources, while also giving a more realistic picture of the time scale required.

Many interventions do not follow a straight line and have unintended consequences.

Carmen and Deirdre describe innovative work being done by IRC to better understand how water service delivery systems evolve and steps towards developing a bottom- up model that illustrates the potential long term systemic effects of individual level change.